Teaching using colour is great.  It automatically adds a new dimension to the class and engages students more than other styles.  Also, the beauty of using colour to introduce the (sometimes tricky) vowel phonemes was that trainees focussed first on a word and were then able to pick the phoneme out from the word.  When I’ve previously taught the session on vowel phonemes, I’ve always done so by pointing at the sound on a chart and then drilling it.  Introducing the sounds in words made the session much more trainee-led and made everyone feel much more comfortable with the topic.

The question now will be whether students are happy with the vowel phonemes without the colours behind them – I’ll find out tomorrow when I do a quick review of all the phonemes at the start of my third session!

I think I’ll use colour phonics in the future to highlight sounds to students who may be having problems with pronunciation.  If I get them familiar with the colours at the start of the course, when a problem arises I can use the cards to point out that a word has a “pink” sound or a “green” sound.  It could also help with minimal pairs to highlight the slight differences between the sounds.  So we could have a pink ship and a green sheep!